1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to language translation services, and more particularly to a language translation service for generating real-time human-based translation of plain text in a crowdsourced environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Instant messaging is widely used for interactive communication between two or more persons over the Internet. For example, millions of Internet users are utilizing interactive software applications such as instant messaging services to communicate with co-works, friends, family, and even to exchange electronic images or other electronic documents (e.g., a text file or spreadsheet). Moreover, several organizations and businesses are integrating instant messaging software applications into their e-mail client software to encourage employee collaboration, and to minimize the cost of maintain and upgrading telecommunication services (e.g., telephone and video conferencing). As communication between people over the Internet increases around the world, the number of different types of interactive software applications is also increasing. These increases can give rise to communication compatibility issues in regard to how the interactive applications integrate with translation services. Moreover, as communication increases between people over the Internet, international communication via interactive applications is becoming more common. As a result, end-users of an interactive application may encounter language barriers when trying to communicate with each other. For example, a large company may have a global workforce of employees that are end-users of an interactive application. The employees may speak different languages and live in different countries, but communicate frequently and exchange documents via the interactive application in order to complete a project. However, the employees may experience difficulty in completing the project due to language barriers, which can reduce their productivity.
In an attempt to address the language barriers, it is known to use machine-based translation services to translate plain text from one language to a different language. However, current machine-based translation services can have very low accuracy, because programming a computer to determine context of words that are spoken or written can be challenging. In addition, to address the language barriers there exists various human-based language translation services to translate plain text from one language to a different language. Human-based language translation services can provide a higher degree of accuracy than machine-based translation, but many human-based language translation services are manual and not real-time, so may not integrate well with various interactive applications.